


you better put your kingdom up for sale

by firstaudrina



Category: American Horror Story, American Horror Story: Apocalypse
Genre: BDSM, Bloodplay, Dom/sub, Face Slapping, Implied/Referenced Drug Use, Leather Kink, Light Bondage, M/M, Orgasm Denial, Post-Canon, Post-Series, S&M, Self-Harm, Whipping, satanic rituals
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-15
Updated: 2019-01-15
Packaged: 2019-10-10 12:22:22
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,500
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17425811
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/firstaudrina/pseuds/firstaudrina
Summary: Michael is trapped in hell. He decides to have some fun while he's there. Post-series.





	you better put your kingdom up for sale

**Author's Note:**

> Tried to tag everything I could think of to be safe, but please tell me if I left anything out!

In hell, Michael comes back to himself.

But not right away. He wakes up and he’s spilling off his bed, he’s spilling the blood of priests and he no longer cares for all his old toys. Choking on disgust, his grandmother forces him out into the street and the path of an oncoming car. She doesn’t even allow him the dignity of dying in her arms, his body broken, his mind arrested.

He wakes up and the room is too hot, hotter, hottest. For a moment he smells sweet chemical perfume and inhales deeply, at peace, before a six-inch blade sinks six inches deep into the space between his ribs. Over and over. So quick he doesn’t even get the chance to laugh.

He wakes up and he’s spilling off the bed, but his brain hasn’t caught up yet and he doesn’t know why his grandmother cannot love him now. 

He wakes up and his mother has already severed his ability to speak. Blood bubbles up his split throat to his gasping lips.

He wakes up and he’s so much bigger than before —

He wakes up and the room is an inferno but this time he’s the one caught in it —

He wakes up —

Somewhere around his six hundred and sixty-sixth brutal death, Michael figures out what the game is. Not a warm welcome from dad, then. Everyone gets the personal treatment in hell, but Michael finds his especially chilly. 

At least now he knows, which means he can get himself out. It’s just a matter of finding the right door. Most leave him back at the start of the loop again: he can exit out the back of Grandma Constance’s and step right into his own bedroom, or force his way through the closet door and wind up in the Murder House. He is not a ghost in the most traditional sense but he’s as much a train on the tracks as they are, constantly circling around to the same conclusion. Failure. Death. Disaster averted for everyone but him. 

At first Michael is without magic, but then he realizes that magic on earth and magic in hell are just different threads on the same frayed sweater. He has to learn how to pull the right one. None of his usual tricks work. He can’t reach deep inside himself for something rotten and glorious. He can’t even rely on blood.

He tries, though. He undresses fully in the kitchen of his mother’s home and applies blade to skin. He scores the insides of his arms, his chest, his thighs; he runs red. He smears a pentagram onto the ground and makes his appeal.

“Father,” he moans. “May you rise from the void. May your darkness guide me. Power in Satan to overcome my weaknesses. Power in your name to be strong within. Please, Father. Show me the door.”

He chants like he used to. _Power in Satan to overcome my weaknesses. Open my eyes. Please. Please, Father, please. Power in Satan. I am your supplicant. I bend to your dark will. Open my eyes._

But Michael is not freed. He bleeds out on old linoleum and wakes up in his childhood bedroom again. The body of the priest lolls beside him. Again.

The only thing that works here is suffering.

Michael spent his entire short life trying to sidestep his own pain, so one can imagine how distasteful he finds the prospect. He has tried to evade; he must embrace.

He wakes up to his grandmother bearing down on him, castigating him, casting him out. And Michael, with his eyes open and aware, takes it all in and thinks: _yes, you’re right. Yes._ With acceptance comes an odd, velvety peace. She tells him he’s not her grandson, that he’s vile and evil, that there is no saving him. And Michael thinks _yes_. Even now, with his eyes full of crocodile tears, all he’s trying to do is manipulate her to his own ends. Beauty and fear, the tools that she gave him before he ever drew breath. 

“That’s right,” he says, pushing back against her forceful hands, fitting his around her throat. “I deserved it. All of it. I couldn’t even destroy a world half-destroyed before I got there. I was free to write my own destiny and this was the one I came up with. I could have chosen another path any time — and every time I picked this one.”

She scrabbles at his wrists so ferociously that she draws blood but she’s no match for him in the end. She weakens. Her gasps stop. The phantom of Constance Langdon has been dispatched. And when Michael looks again at the old baby blue door of his bedroom, he finds it altered. Magic.

Blood works after all. 

The wood of the door is glossy and blackish-green, with a strange glow in the grain that can’t be sourced to any light in the room or beyond it. The doorknob is hot under Michael’s fingers, but it turns. When Michael passes through into the hallway beyond, one of many maze-like corridors lined with identical doors that lead to disparate places, he feels himself change. Change back. His hair cascades onto his shoulders again. His clothes transform, rumpled and childish giving way to polished and mature. He can feel the pull of his velvet blazer along his back. Is this the truest version of him? Is this the Michael he really is, way down deep inside? It’s a construct he came up with after hours spent scouring fashion blogs and taking tips from Ariel Augustus, designed to be the ideal Antichrist for the millennial generation. Is that who he is? He could never be certain.

Regardless, it’s who he is in hell. 

Michael traipses down one hallway and then another, his fingertips trailing along the walls. Everything looks the same. All around him, behind each door, he can hear a faint, droning hum. If he listens closer, the language of hell reveals itself to him in cries and screams, desperate pleading. But he lets it fade into distant music as he goes. He has plenty of time to give it his attention later. It’s not like he’s ever getting out of here.

He peers into people’s eternal torment like flipping channels on a TV. So boring. This one is stuck in high school; that one’s teeth are crumbling out of their mouth always, forever. Dark dreams made into terrifying realities that cannot hold Michael’s interest for more than a second.

But then he finds a door that leads to someone he knows. And that is just too tempting. 

When Michael moves through the door into Gallant’s personal hell, he finds himself in the middle of a party. A gleaming marble ballroom stretches vast and endless around him, packed from wall to wall with bedazzled, aging guests — friends of Mrs. Evie Gallant, no doubt. At the center of the room, caught up in the throng at all sides, is Gallant himself.

Wearing a slim-cut suit in a soft, muted blue, Gallant stands arm in arm with a blandly handsome man. His icy blond hair has been conservatively parted on one side and the only piece of jewelry he’s wearing is a plain white gold band on his left ring finger. It matches his partner’s. Cradled in Gallant’s free arm is a mewling newborn baby. Two Yorkies have planted themselves at his feet, connected to his wrist by thin diamante leashes. Behind his eyes, he is screaming.

“Yes,” the husband schmoozes to someone, “We just bought the most darling little cottage and we should be done renovating just in time for baby number two —”

Michael comes to a stop in front of Gallant. “How tragic,” he says. “Always Dad, never Daddy.”

Gallant locks onto him like a port in a storm. He immediately disentangles from his husband before foisting the baby onto him. Michael thinks for a moment and then his outfit changes, velvet to leather. Never hurts to play to one’s audience. 

“You’re not supposed to be dead,” Michael continues. “The little witch turned back the clock. What happened?”

“I — what?” Gallant says. “I’m not…” He blinks rapidly, pale eyelids shuttering black eyes. “No. I’m —” He looks around again, sensing the wrongness of his surroundings with sudden conviction. He may have suspected that he was the defective one this entire time, but now he knows — it’s obvious, it’s on his face — that everyone else is in error. “I don’t know what happened. Do I know you?”

Michael turns Gallant’s face towards him with a firm hand, registering the instant interest and discarding it. He closes his eyes and looks, finds answers in flashes: Gallant’s white head bent over white lines; Gallant stumbling on unstable legs to a chrome bathroom; staring at himself in the mirror as he works a hand beneath his waistband; taking off his snakeskin belt and putting it around his neck; getting closer and closer until suddenly a heart weakened by repeated overdoses suddenly gives up and he falls, shocked and clutching his chest, to the ground.

That heart of his. He would never have survived the world ending.

“You would trip and fall into hell,” Michael remarks. When he drops his hand, Gallant drops too, gripping his thighs and gasping as memories rush back. Typical. Michael touches the visible vertebrae at the nape of Gallant’s bent neck, tracing the edge of his nail up and over each bump. He thinks of a bunker at the end of the world and scissors slammed into lavender silk. He thinks of apples. And then he asks, “Do you remember everything now?”

When Gallant looks at him again, Michael knows that he does.

“Good boy,” Michael says. “Or, I should say, very, very bad.”

Gallant adjusts himself with a practiced air, almost like he’s shaking the shock and horror from his shoulders as he stands. He’s too assertive to be coy; instead he’s something like a hunter asking to be hunted. “What are you gonna do about it?”

“What are _you_?” Michael sidesteps him, circling out of Gallant’s field of vision with an unnecessary flourish. “Will you pledge yourself to me? Strip naked and bend over for my latex golem? Take a whipping, stab me in the heart?”

Gallant turns in time with him, spins on his heel. Fish hooked. “Yes.”

Michael takes him by the jaw and drags him close enough that his wet, wanting mouth opens expectantly. “It’s the thoughtlessness that damns people. You’re all so hungry. It’s all you think about. You want to be satiated? Satisfied?”

Gallant’s unsettlingly opaque eyes have already dulled; he leans all his weight into the unkind clutch of Michael’s fingers. “Not if you don’t want me to be.”

Michael huffs. Lets go. 

“I mean,” Gallant says. “That’s not what I need. I like — the opposite.” 

Is a man who dies before he comes perpetually on the edge of an orgasm? Or does the little rich boy just love to be told no?

Michael knows who Gallant is in the casual, unquestioned way that he knows everything, if he wants to know it. He knows that Gallant was born to a sixteen-year-old socialite after a bad night on burnt champagne. She deposited him with parents who were too old and careless to do anything but give him whatever he wanted and when he was not grateful for this, to punish him for it. They called him Trip when he was little because he was the third of his name, but Gallant was better for branding. His given name is Theodore. Teddy.

None of this information exactly explains why he’s interested in physical pain or emotionally unavailable men. Once in high school he got beat up and it made him hard; he jerked off while tonguing the bloody fissure of his split lip. Michael knows this too. But he’s not a psychiatrist. Things like that — desires, fetishes — can spiral out of coincidence. Michael never quite got a chance to figure that out for himself. 

Maybe he should.

Michael sits. This is an odd thing: he sits without checking that there is something there to catch him, but it doesn’t matter, because the red velvet chaise finds him. Had he put it there, or was it there already? How much control does he have? He notices the husband and the baby and the dogs are gone, but the rest of the guests mill around without interest, extras waiting to be told what to do. He feels like he is eating the energy of the room with both hands. 

His arms span the chaise’s sloping, lopsided back. “What are you going to do about it?”

Gallant scrambles and slides automatically to his knees at Michael’s feet, framed between leather riding boots. “How are you here?” he says, with an expression of helpless delight, a man given an unexpected treat. “Was I — was I not so bad? Is this not the bad place?”

The corner of Michael’s mouth pulls up and he touches Gallant’s cheek again, gentle, with his knuckles. Then he strikes him, hard. Gallant’s lip ruptures at the center, blood dripping off the curve of his chin and onto his respectable suit. His tongue finds the split just as Michael’s curious fingers do. “I lost,” Michael drawls. “And so did you.” 

He probes the cut, hot to the touch and tender, puffy with irritation. If it was a real wound then it would likely scar, hopelessly fucking up the clean arc of Gallant’s bottom lip. Michael wonders at the level of detail work afforded to the magic of the afterlife. Gallant licks the blood from the pads of his fingers, leaning after him when Michael pulls away. He looks down at his skin, tinged red, and then tastes it himself. Gallant makes a desperate, distressed sound. The blood is warm and fleshy and bitter, like real blood, as though this were not a world made of spirits. Details. 

Next, a surprise — as Michael marvels over the realism of his prison, Gallant grabs him by the leather lapels of his jacket and jerks him close enough for a painful kiss. 

It occurs to Michael that he has never kissed anyone. There’s nothing to it, quite literally: it isn’t and then it is; he doesn’t know and then he does. Familiar and strange, the sensation of another person’s lips, their breath, the slickness of blood and saliva. It is always a little bit of a shock that bodies just feel like bodies. Gallant is forceful, he parts Michael’s lips immediately and shoves his tongue into Michael’s mouth. He opens his eyes to see the plane of Gallant’s cheek, his sparse brownish eyelashes, and beyond him a room of bored eldritch horrors dressed in their best. 

Michael sucks on Gallant’s lip and then bites. Gallant surges forward on a moan, his hips jerking against Michael’s thigh, so he pushes Gallant back with both hands on his shoulders. Back to his knees on the unforgiving floor, panting. Both their mouths red. 

“Are you hard?”

“You have to hurt me more than that,” Gallant says.

Interest flares. Teasingly, entertained, Michael wonders, “Emotionally?”

Gallant swallows and slumps. It must be a sore spot. Michael likes those. “You did a lot of that already.”

Enough to inspire Gallant to pick up a pair of scissors and spear a body he thought belonged to Michael. “Uh-huh,” he answers slowly, lifting one boot to press lightly — and then not so lightly — to Gallant’s cock. “I’ve found it very effective.”

Gallant’s breathing is shallow. It’s ridiculously audible in the ballroom, highlighting the fact that no one else is even making the attempt. The blood has begun to crust on his boring suit, a red swath of depravity across its mild surface. He cups Michael’s ankle; his fingers _feel_ the leather. He follows the boot’s seam up to the crease of Michael’s knee and then back down his shin to the blunt, pointed toe. Michael bears down. Gallant angles himself just enough to press his mouth to leather, drag his tongue over it.

“How hard did you come when you thought I was fucking you?”

Gallant says, “I came three times.”

Michael raises an eyebrow, impressed. “Pent up,” he notes. “What did you like about it?”

He bristles unexpectedly. “Our interview’s over.”

“Yes,” Michael agrees. “But I could crush your dick if I wanted, so I think you should tell me.”

Gallant’s hips shift against him at the threat. “Latex,” he says. “On my skin.” He clears his throat. “Felt like you were taking a risk for me.” 

His vulnerability is delicious, because Michael can see that it costs him something. 

“You don’t mean anything to me,” Michael says. “Even here. Yours was just the first door I found.”

Though, to be fair, he probably wouldn’t have allowed the heiress or Andre to hump his boot in the middle of hell. Maybe Venable. Not that she would. Gallant being so particularly pitiable is what’s appealing. It makes Michael feel that dark thrumming in his veins again. 

He decides to test it. A cracking sound echoes through the room and Gallant gasps, hand flying to his back. 

“You liked that too, didn’t you?” Michael asks.

Gallant’s eyes find his wildly, wide. “How are you —” His mouth doesn’t know what to do, to wince or laugh. “Yeah. Yeah.” 

Again. The room punctured by the sound of a whip that cannot be seen. Gallant scrabbling uselessly at his skin through the thick fabric of the suit, bent so far forward his forehead presses against Michael’s knee. He finally releases Gallant from the steady press of the sole of his shoe so he can put his hands under the jacket and ease it off. 

Again. Michael coasts his palms over the flat of Gallant’s back and can feel the shape of welts already forming, the heat of them. He understands, suddenly. 

Again. Michael would like to tear the shirt down the middle and peel it away but all of his energy is on each strike. Gallant is strung between his knees again, arms around his hips, body jerking with the phantom whip. Michael thinks it would be vulgar to wield a physical one, heft the leather handle and feel the impact up his arm into his shoulder. It has no elegance. He has always liked his pain with distance. Or blood.

Though now he feels himself open to other possibilities.

Again. Michael is hard. 

Again. He pushes at the collar of the dress shirt Gallant is still wearing. The silk tie knotted around his throat must press up against his windpipe because there is a muffled, hitched little noise pressed into Michael’s thigh. But Gallant likes that too; he likes a lot of things. And he’s already dead. He doesn’t need to breathe. 

Michael slides a hand under him to unravel the knot, to yank buttons free. He jerks the shirt back as far as it can go, Gallant’s milk-pale back emphasizing the bright pink welts crisscrossing its surface. Michael rakes his nails over them and Gallant whines. 

“Say uncle.”

“Let me suck your dick,” Gallant begs. 

Michael snorts. “Do you think I should?” First the pad of his finger along one of those inflamed lines of flesh, then the edge of his short nail. Over and over. “Are you any good at it?”

Gallant noses along the inner seam of Michael’s tailored trousers, presses his tongue flat against the zipper. He promises, “I’ll suck your fucking soul out.”

Michael laughs, and he’s still laughing when he says, inexplicably, “You know, I’m a virgin. Imagine. The son of Satan.” He manhandles Gallant with a fistful of starched blonde hair, gets him out of the way so Michael can unlatch his belt, unzip, pull out his cock. Obscenely bare against the backdrop of his clothes. Leather and velvet and silk and skin. “Wait.”

He loosens the red scarf from his neck and leans forward, gathering Gallant’s wrists at his lower back and threading the fabric around them. Tying it tight. So much color, and so little: disheveled white shirt, red silk, pale skin, dark eyes watching him. Blood on Gallant’s mouth still. 

“So you’ll behave.” 

Gallant shuffles forward on his knees, hushed with concentration. His mouth is already open but it’s his cheek that makes contact first, his eyes closing as he nestles in close. His warm exhale holds so much relief that Michael considers hitting him again. But then Gallant takes him in and swallows him down, sudden and all at once, gagging briefly in an on-purpose way. Showy. Then his throat relaxes. And this time it feels like Michael is under the whip.

He doesn’t mean to — 

Anything. He doesn’t mean to do anything or feel anything, but it’s liquifying. His skull thumps against the wooden frame of the chaise and he breathes in sharply, brow furrowed, uncomprehending. He’s buzzing. His entire body is buzzing. 

He slides a hand down with the intention of holding himself steady for Gallant, but instead gets distracted by feeling the pull of Gallant’s mouth with his fingertips. Spit leaks from the corner of his lips. Every part of him that can work works: his tongue is a steady little undulation, his head tilts with the twisting of his mouth, even his chest heaves. He shows total disregard for his own comfort, taking Michael in all the way, throat tight and almost muscular. Tears slide over Gallant’s cheeks but his temples hold no tension; his forehead creases only with dedication, his expression otherwise rapturous. 

Maybe Michael should fuck him.

He spares a moment for that thought right before he comes, in Gallant, feeling the convulsing of his throat as he swallows. He doesn’t want to let Michael go even after. Keeps him there until he’s soft and sore, tries to tease him back to fullness until Michael replaces his dick with his fingers, gives Gallant something else to suck on. 

He’s a wreck, bloodied and bruised, clothes all tangled, drowsy with arousal. Michael pulls his hand free to trace Gallant’s tear tracks, to press against his split lip. He can feel it pulsing from too much attention. He leans forward to untie Gallant’s wrists. To cup his cock through his pants. The fabric is wet.

“Sometime when you were whipping me,” Gallant explains around a yawn. “Ghost-whipping. Whatever.”

Michael finds his belt buckle and slides leather free from metal. He unbuttons and unzips, pushes the fabric down Gallant’s thighs. Angled forward as he is, the ends of his hair trail teasingly over Gallant’s still-irritated back, making him shiver. He’s not entirely soft. When Michael touches him again, he hisses, body arcing so his stomach sucks in and his head bows. He clutches Michael’s legs. The boots, obviously. 

“I can’t,” Gallant whines, but when he looks up at Michael it’s with that same heated, hunted look. 

“No? I’ve heard boasts of your multi-orgasmic capabilities.” Michael surveys him lazily, close enough that their noses would brush if he so much as tilted his head. “You’re not getting me in latex.”

Gallant thrusts involuntarily into his hand. Michael loosens his grip. 

“You’re dead,” he continues. “You don’t have a refractory period. You don’t even have a body, technically.” 

Gallant frowns, quizzical or unnerved. Michael works him over without effort, leaving it to him to roll his hips into it, to seek friction. His cock swells and twitches in Michael’s hand, his breathing quickens again. But when he screws his eyes shut in anticipation of what might be his next orgasm, Michael lets go of him entirely. 

“Well,” Michael sighs. “If you don’t think you can do it.”

“You fucker,” Gallant groans.

“Oh, I’m sorry, were you reconsidering?” Michael starts jerking him off again, watching the petulant frustration on his face melt into a warier pleasure. “My mistake.” 

Gallant shifts his grip from shin to forearm, like holding onto Michael will stop him from letting go again. “Kiss me,” he demands.

Michael smiles. His tongue flicks out to taste the beads of blood on Gallant’s lip. Amused, he says, “No.” 

He pushes Gallant away so they’re no longer touching anywhere except fingers to cock. Michael has to slouch, perched at the very edge of his seat with one leg stretched and one bent. His shoulder aches. Gallant sits up on his knees, sways without an anchor. He’s buzzing too, his hips unable to cease moving, his whimpers unmuffled. 

And Michael releases him again.

Gallant sags with a heartfelt “fuck!” His head falls back to expose the long line of his throat, where his pulse beats madly against his skin. His heart must be racing. Perspiration lends a sheen to his chest. Come beads on his cock. The devil really is in the details.

Michael sinks even closer, barely maintaining his seat, and takes Gallant by the back of the neck to draw him in again. Gallant is pliant, hopeless. He wets his lips and meets Michael’s gaze cautiously, eyes an oil spill. He swallows. And Michael lets him live in his uncertainty for much longer than is necessary or appealing, until Gallant’s body is all tension, so tight. 

Then Michael touches him, carefully. Glides over the sweat on his chest from collarbone to stomach. Wraps his hand around Gallant’s cock again. “Are you nervous?” he taunts, drags the words out slow. In contrast, his fingers move faster, determinedly. He is relentless. “Maybe this is your eternal damnation. The Sisyphean orgasm.”

The look Gallant gives him is undaunted. “How’s that hell?”

Michael smiles. The hand on Gallant’s neck slips down to the space between his shoulder blades and he scrapes his nails over the skin there. Gallant jolts against him and comes almost instantly, surprised and silent — so on edge that he couldn’t see it coming, and couldn’t possibly be satisfied by its suddenness. 

Michael allows Gallant to linger in his arms, shaking, for a long minute.

Then they both revert to their former positions, exhausted: Michael sprawls on the chaise with Gallant half on the floor and half in his lap, head pillowed on his stomach. Michael gives Gallant his hand and he licks it clean, tongue sliding between Michael’s fingers and around his rings. 

Gallant’s voice is rough when he murmurs, “Is that why people sell their souls?”

“Unfortunately, yes,” Michael says. “Most people don’t have very grand ambitions.” 

He snorts. “You know…” he starts, but his voice trails off and when Michael looks, he sees that Gallant has drifted into sleep, worn out.

And a split second before it happens, Michael realizes exactly what that means. “Oh, f—”

Before the word is even out of his mouth, he’s back on the other side of the room, clean and tidy again. Gallant stands in the center with a man on his arm and dogs at his feet, fielding question after question from guests who have snapped back into their roles. His suit is immaculate. His hair is combed.

Fucking hell.


End file.
